Trump appeared on the All In Podcast recently and stated that every international student who graduates from a US university should receive a green card “automatically”. I’ve never understood this sentiment, and I’ve heard it everywhere, and always spoken with an air of self-righteous compassion, as if American-born Americans who would love to attend their native universities don’t exist at all. Trump 2024 is not Trump 2016, and this attitude about doling out green cards proves it. This is amnesty through the American university system, and would be transformed as such if this policy were adopted. Trump’s transformation here is another variation of the “America as international buffet”, the MAGA figurehead turning on the movement he spawned by slipping amnesty in through the back door. Entire generations of Americans are being totally ignored, their futures discarded, in favor of this type of shallow, self-righteous pandering. There should be no talk at all of prioritizing non-citizens over citizens, no matter their credentials. Immigration in moderation is great, and there is no need to encourage it, it will happen naturally. The only appropriate attitude regarding immigration from a Presidential candidate should revolve around how to stem the tide. Here’s what I’d like to hear from Trump: “How do we get more Americans in our universities and graduate programs?” Not “automatic green cards”.
Trump is slipping into the “America as international buffet” status quo elite attitude that we’ve all been acclimated to accept. Why should we feel so ashamed to say that America, first and foremost, should be for Americans, just as Lebanon should be for the Lebanese, Mexico for the Mexican, Canada for the Canadian, France for the French, India for the Indians, et cetera et cetera, so on and so forth. Taught from birth the myth of the melting pot, we Americans are conditioned to accept the world gorging our native country while bitching about how there isn’t more that they are given. Zelensky is a good example, the ingrate archetype, constantly demanding more, and being given more. Well, no more.
Shouldn’t American universities be for Americans? Shouldn’t American jobs, primarily? Yes we benefit from immigrant labor, but no self-respecting nation should be concerned with immigration primarily as a cheap source of labor, which strays into the morally corrupt field of the human trafficking of vulnerable foreigners. Is it somehow hateful to state this in this way? Entire generations of young Americans are experiencing a nullification of their futures because our leaders are focused on groups of people other than they themselves.
Refugees enter the US illegally by the hundreds of thousands every month, and yet we ignore the growing number of American-born displaced, a direct consequence of our leaders’ preoccupation with “globalization” and the import of foreign laborers.
We should again feel comfortable with stating openly that American should primarily be for Americans.
